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Circuit Simulation | |
Using a computer to simulate the behaviour of electrical or electronic circuits has both advantages and disadvantages over conventional methods. A computer can perform hundreds of millions of operations per second and is therefore much faster and more accurate than calculations by hand and results are available in minutes. Also, measurements which would be difficult or impossible to do on a real circuit can be made. Many simulator programs allow schematic input some even allow the drafting of a pcb layout. The disadvantage to using any program is that you still have to design the circuit yourself, and results will only be as good as your initial circuit input.
Most Simulation programs are based on the original 1970's Berkley SPICE (Simulation Program with Integrated Circuit Emphasis)program and some have additional facilities. The original Spice2 program was wrote in fortran and contained models for transistors, FET's, diodes resistors and capacitors and could perform AC and DC analysis, transient and time domain analysis. The later Spice3 addition included models for MOSFET and added noise, distortion and pole-zero analysis.
Today many companies sell commercial simulator programs based on the original SPICE3 but with added flexibility and features. For instance, multiple analysis may be run at different temperatures (invaluablefor investigating thermal properties of a circuit), component tolerances may be swept (monte-carlo analysis), fourier analysis for investigating distortion and more.
Simulator ProgramsTo grab yourself a copy, visit this page on Linear Technologies web site. The program can be run under both windows and linux. For linux just make sure you have "Wine" installed, most modern linux distributions include wine on their software repositories.
LTspice User Group
